[userbinator]

I wonder what the reason was for having the kernel handle this, instead of the shell? To allow programs besides the shell to execute interpreted scripts as if they were actual binaries?

This is of course in stark contrast to dynamic linking, which is performed by a userspace program instead of the kernel, and much like the #!, this "interpreter"'s path is also hardcoded in dynamically linked binaries.

[stabbles]

In a call `execve("/my/script", ...)` of course the kernel has to figure out how to run it, there is no shell involved.

As for scripts vs elf executables, there's not much of a difference between the shebang line and PT_INTERP, just that parsing shebangs lines is simpler.

[ajb]

Remember how slow early machines were. An unnecessary additional 'exec' would have seemed very wasteful, especially as most of the initial uses would have been shell scripts, so you would be execing the shell twice.

[alexey-salmin]

> This is of course in stark contrast to dynamic linking, which is performed by a userspace program instead of the kernel

I'm not sure what the contrast is. In both cases the interpreter lives in userspace, in both cases kernel finds it via the path hardcoded in the file: shebang for text, .interp for ELF